John Whitehead's Commentary

"Suicide or homicide /Homicide and suicide / Into sleep I'm sinking / Why me I'm thinking / Homicidal and suicidal thoughts, intermixing / My life's not worth fixing."

This poem, written by a young man before he entered a school and began shooting, is not merely a suicide note. It is a cry for help.

As the incidents of bomb threats and shootings increase, one thing is clear: something more sinister than disgruntled students is afoot in America's schools. For example, just last month, police in the state of Washington arrested a 16-year-old who supposedly had crafted an elaborate plot to shoot his classmates before taking his own life. This young man said he planned "to go out in a blaze of hatred and fury."

Being a young person in America today is often overwhelming. Everywhere we turn, life is chaotic--continuing wars, violence, environmental crises, oil depletion and terrorism, to name a few. On a daily basis, children are confronted with issues, images and material of all sorts--abortion, drugs, alcohol, pornography, sexual predators, ad infinitum--that were once the province of adults only. In other words, our children have been adultified, and childhood is disappearing.

But it is more than that. "In short, the sense of a so-called disappearance of childhood is, in actuality, about the loss of a stable, seemingly natural foundation for social life," writes professor Stuart Aitken, "that is clearly linked not only to laments over the lost innocence of childhood, but also a growing anger at and fear of young people."

Much of this fear and anger stems from school shootings, most notably the massacre at Columbine High School in April 1999 that still lingers over us like a death shadow. This is reflected in how troubled students--some of whom are in grade school--are treated: instead of psychological counseling, they are often jailed and treated as hardened criminals.

Several years ago, after interviewing students who had planned and executed school shootings, the U.S. Secret Service released a report on school violence. Their first and very important finding was that there is no profile for a school shooter. Shooters come from many types of families, from all incomes, races and academic backgrounds. And there are no easy explanations--such as mental illness, drugs, video games--for their actions.

Since no profile exists, this means that to many school officials anyone walking the hallways is a potential shooter. Thus, paranoia often saturates the school environment where, through the use of zero tolerance policies, a child who mistakenly brings her nail clippers to school is treated as harshly as the youngster who brings a gun.

This attitude is one reason why school shooters continue to go undetected. By suspecting everyone and punishing kids for innocent mistakes, the shootings are bound to happen for the simple reason that school officials are focusing on the wrong individuals.

This leads me to the next point. Unlike the girl who mistakenly brings nail clippers to school, the shooters plan their shootings in advance. As the Secret Service report found, the killers "did not snap."

Moreover, according to the report, most shooters also told their friends what they were planning. However, the friends neither reported what they had been told nor tried to stop the shooters. And when the Secret Service asked former school shooters what they would have done if a teacher had asked them what was wrong, the shooters said they would have told the adult the truth, including their plans.

Our young people are trying to tell us something, but they don't believe adults are listening. As one school shooter recalls: "Most of them don't care. I just felt like nobody cared. I just wanted to hurt them."

It is not just the teachers but parents as well who often fail to listen. And the older extended family--mom, dad, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles--has dissipated, along with local communities that once kept watch over children.

Once, children were brought up primarily by their parents. But as a professor at Cornell University has said:

While the family still has the primary moral and legal responsibility for the character development of children, it often lacks the power or opportunity to do the job, primarily because parents and children no longer spend enough time together in those situations in which such training is possible. This is not because parents do not want to spend time with their children. It is simply that conditions have changed.

Children spend a large portion of their waking hours at school, which means that the parental task has been largely replaced by public school officials. But the schools, where any religious references have been removed, cannot give badly needed moral guidance. No school can be a true substitute for the humanizing effect a loving family can have on a child. And there is no way a teacher has enough time to get to know a child the way a good parent can. Thus, the warning signs are being missed. But they are always there if someone is paying attention.

Before the Columbine shooting, the local sheriff had been given copies of Eric Harris' website, describing his pipe bombs, with page after page of threats: "You all better f...... hide in your houses because im comin for EVERYONE soon, and I WILL be armed to the f...... teeth and I WILL shoot to kill and I WILL f...... KILL EVERYTHING." Shortly thereafter, Harris and Dylan Klebold entered the high school and blew people away.

There are conditions--such as peer pressure, low self-esteem, childhood abuse, etc.--that can play a triggering or facilitating role in violent behavior. However, they speak to the deeper societal and cultural influences that come into play when young people elect violence as their response to the chaotic and stressful conditions that surround them.

In particular, we have to take into account, along with the loss of stable family institutions, the dehumanizing nature of modern society. Schools that often resemble prisons with barbed wire and police play a factor. Graphic and violent images bombard our children on a continual basis--such as dehumanizing images in the media of photographs showing Iraqi prisoners being subjected to abuse by American military police. Lurid pornographic images proliferate on the Internet, as pedophiles stalk the young. The list goes on, and it gets worse.

Our young people know something is dreadfully wrong. But many of us adults hurry through the hectic day, reaching for success in our materialistic society. And when the kids scream for help, we often don't hear.

Young people mirror adults. And as the old adage goes, what one generation learns in school (and from society in general) is the philosophy of the next. Sounds frightening, doesn't it?

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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